Secrecy and the Reporter

by JAMES B. RESTON

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THE conflict between officials and reporters in Washington over what information about foreign affairs should be made public is now becoming an important issue. In a country whose action depends upon consent of the people and whose actions now affect the interests of the whole world, an understanding between reporters and officials on the obligations and rights of the reporter is imperative, but no such understanding exists today. Instead, responsible officials and responsible reporters, as distinguished from the oldfashioned scoop-artists, gossipmongers, and saloonrail journalists, are now playing cops and robbers with each other. The object of the cops seems to be to conceal information. The object of the robbers is to disclose information. Both sides just go on waging their own private little cold war, to the despair of each other and the detriment of the public.

While Secretary of State Acheson does not dislike reporters personally, he apparently thinks they are presumptuous, superficial, often selfish and indifferent to the public interest, irresponsible with secret information, much too distrustful and skeptical of officials, and far too interested in being first with any story rather than being right and careful with what he regards as the main story. The executive branch of the government, he argues, must heave the right of uninterrupted private discussion and negotiation among its own officials and with other governments, and until it decides to disclose that information—even if its about such things as the hydrogen bomb — the reporters have no right to violate the government’s privacy and report what’s going on. There is a lot in his argument, and it is easy to illustrate.

Several weeks ago, General Omar Bradley accepted an invitation to make a private talk to the members of the Overseas Writers, a group of former foreign correspondents in Washington. In the course of answering questions, the General said that, speaking as a soldier, he could see advantages to rearming the Germans. Within an hour after the meeting, somebody present reported (and distorted) his remarks to an offend of the French embassy. By 5.30 of the same afternoon, a French official was at the State Department, seeking an assurance that the United States was not for rearming the Germans. And within forty-eight hours, General Bradley’s views on the rearmament of Germany were being openly discussed in the French press.

The net effect of the incident was that the U.S. government was embarrassed by the indiscretion of an American correspondent, doubts were raised in France about the reliability of U.S. policy in Germany, and General Bradley (and every other official who heard about the incident) was highly skeptical of the value of any off-the-record discussions with reporters.

A similar but even more disturbing incident occurred at the height of the Soviet pressure on Yugoslavia last year. Various highly secret meetings were held in Washington on what action the United States and Britain should take in the event of a Soviet armed attack on Yugoslavia. One reporter published a dispatch several days later saying that the United States and Britain had decided that they would give some aid to Ylarshal Tito if war broke out but that they definitely would not go to war themselves for him.

This naturally was interpreted by the Yugoslavs as an invitation to the Russians to make war against Yugoslavia, and it was properly condemned in Washington as a dangerous and senseless bit of journalistic enterprise.

It is a matter of opinion why such incidents as these occur, but my own view is that they occur partly because an atmosphere of rivalry, perhaps even of hostility, has grown up between reporters and the sources of official information; partly because the exclusive report of an interesting bit of information is still regarded as a triumph in the newspaper business, even if the information is more damaging than beneficial; and partly because the old points of contact and coöperation between reporters and officials are breaking down.

In William Allen White’s generation, officials in Washington had plenty of time to see correspondents. The Secretary of State in those days could devote weeks and even months to meditation upon the Newfoundland Fisheries problem. The corps of correspondents was small and dependable. When Henry L. Stimson was Secretary of State in the Hoover administration, he held a press conference every day and saw correspondents privately and regularly.

This produced understanding both ways, but it is not possible in 1950. Mr. Acheson has to deal with a press corps that is larger than the Senate and House of Representatives, combined. If he sees a correspondent privately once or twice a year, that is about par for the course. He holds his press conferences once a week, but whenever a big story is breaking, the reporters, under pressure to report the facts, cannot see him and can find only with the greatest difficulty somebody — usually in another country’s embassy — who can give them reliable information.

Thus the main link between the reporter and the official source of news is broken at the most critical time. The other link, the off-the-record press conference, has broken down for a variety of reasons. When Mr. Acheson or one of his aides thinks about talking off-the-record to the State Department correspondents today, he has to remember that among those correspondents are the representatives of the Soviet news agency, Tass. He has also to remember that organizations such as the Associated Press sometimes consider it a useful information and public relations policy to send a summary of his off-the-record remarks to all member newspapers for the private information of their editors. These private memos give a lot of publishers and editors a sense of being in on things, but they terrify government officials and in the long run make them hesitant to say anything to any large group off-the-record.

Even the meetings between top government officials and small groups of, say, ten or twelve dependable correspondents are breaking down, not because the correspondents have misused or betrayed the information given them in these meetings but because government officials have less and less time, and — as the cold war gets hotter — are more and more afraid that they’ll be blamed for saying something that some other official thinks they shouldn’t have said.

We must be fair to the officials about this. Their problems are varied and perplexing. The government of course must protect its right to private discussions and private negotiations. The consequences of premature disclosure in certain negotiations can be serious. The reporters of the Soviet government; the American correspondents who would rather be first than be right; the peephole journalists, who have transferred their talents and their mass audiences from obstetrics to politics without any period of gestation — all these are problems.

But the people have to be adequately informed in a democracy in spite of these problems, and the government is not doing what it could to keep informing them. The more complex our problems become, the more dangerous they become, then the more they must be explained to the people; but the opposite procedure now prevails. The fireside chat that most useful educational contact between the President and the people — ended just when issues began to get really confused; that is to say, precisely when it was needed the most. As the crises in Germany and in the Far East have become more complex, the official sources of information on these subjects have not opened up, but have tended to close down.

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LET me illustrate the public’s side of this problem. The government’s handling of its public relations on Formosa and the Far East is an illustration of how inadequate cooperation between responsible reporters and responsible officials can contribute to public confusion, violent controversy, and a fear at home and abroad that the giant doesn’t quite know how to use his strength.

Officials at the State Department had every opportunity to explain their Far Eastern policy late in 1949 but they did not do so. They complained constantly that their policy was being misrepresented, and they promised to make available summaries of that policy before Christmas of 1949, but they never did. Nor did they say anything else to explain U.S. policy in that part of the world.

As a result, when Senators Knowland of California and Smith of New Jersey came back from the Far East shouting about the doom of Formosa and its importance to the U.S., the public had little basis for judgment on the rights or wrongs of their charges. An angry debate ensued, and Mr. Acheson finally had to jump into it with the complaint that things were getting out of hand.

Even after the decision was made by President Truman in the National Security Council that the U.S. was not going to send troops or military missions to Formosa, it was not announced. The argument was allowed to go on for another week before the President let the people know that he had settled the issue.

Finally, when it was decided to make a major statement on U.S. policy on the Far East, how was it made? In a national broadcast which could be heard by the people? In a careful state document

which could servo as a guide for the future? It was made in an extemporaneous address at 1.30 one Thursday afternoon to the National Press Club because Mr. Acheson had promised the retiring president of that club that he’d make a speech one day before the club president retired.

I happen to believe that our policy on Formosa was right, given the conditions in January, 1950. I also happen to think that Dean Acheson is incomparably the ablest Secretary of State the United States has had since Henry L. Stimson; but on this question of public information, no contemporary public official has contrived to do so little with so much. Even when he did explain his Far Eastern policy, what did he say? He said that the Russians were “detaching" the four northern provinces from China and “attaching” them to the Soviet Union (which wasn’t quite true), He based his whole Formosa policy of noninterference on the thesis that (lie Chinese were inevitably going to react against the Soviet Union, and that we should not, bv going into Formosa, deflect China’s wratth from the Russians to ourselves. But all this had been true for years. The Russians did not suddenly go into the northern provinces of China. They were there last year, and if the State Department had made its policy clear about China and Formosa then, much of the divisive argument of late 1949 and early 1950 might have been avoided.

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NOTHING in recent years in Washington has produced quite so much controversy in the field of what should and should not be published as the hydrogen bomb. President Truman was opposed to any public discussion of the bomb or his interest in it. If he had had his way, nothing would have been said in public at all: he would merely have ordered the bomb built, like any other weapon, with no announcement, no discussion, no debate about the responsibilities of American power or the international control of atomic energy.

It’s a good idea not to be dogmatic about this particular case. Very few reporters would be prepared to argue that they had the right to disclose information about powerful new American weapons. Several unusual facts, however, are relevant.

First, it was not a reporter who let out this particular cat. As early as December, 1946, when John J. McCloy was Assistant Secretary of War, he discussed publicly the possibility of producing a hydrogen bomb 1000 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb. P. M. S. Blackett, the British physicist, discussed the super-bomb in a book in 1948, and Senator Johnson of Colorado discussed it in a television broadcast last November 1.

“Our scientists,”he said, “have already created a bomb that has six times the effectiveness of the bomb that was dropped at Nagasaki and they are not satisfied at all. They want one that has 1000 times the effect of that terrible bomb that was dropped at Nagasaki that snuffed out the lives of 50,000 people. . . . They have been devoting their time to two things: one to make a super-bomb; and the other to find some way of detonating a bomb before the fellow who wants to drop it can detonate it. We have made considerable progress in that direction.”

This extraordinary statement by a member of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee was naturally reported in the press. Al Friendly of the Washington Post, hearing about the broadcast, got hold of the text and printed what Senator Johnson said. The Alsop brothers followed with three columns on the difficult decision facing the President. And the New York Times then published a series of articles on the scientific aspects of hydrogen fusion, and the political and military questions raised within the Administration prior to the President’s decision to order production of the bomb.

During the preliminary debate within the Administration, some of the men who knew most about the possibilities of the H-bomb took the position that this was not really a weapon of war alone but a means of exterminating whole populations. To treat it merely as a military secret which raised no new political and moral questions seemed to them an extraordinary procedure, and some of them said so at the time.

These facts raise the question of the newspaper’s rights and obligations in its most difficult form. Who is to decide whether the information should be published ? What is to be the basis of judgment ? Is military security alone to be the test? If the President is to be the sole judge, is he free to exert this right indiscriminately, say, to cover up shortcomings or divisions within his own Administration?

I find it difficult to be as positive in answering these questions as the President is. His attitude is that he must be trusted to decide such things without interference or pressure from the outside. I don’t know what he expected the papers to do about Senator Johnson’s broadcast , but apparently we were supposed to ignore it, and all the arguments within the government that followed. There was, however, one aspect of the situation that could not be ignored. In the middle of the debate, before the President made his decision about the H-bomb, President James B. Conant of Harvard University publicly charged that the Administration had not yet devised “even the first approximation to a satisfactory procedure for evaluating technical judgments on matters connected with the national defense.”

Mr. Conant was on the original AchesonLilienthal Committee that studied the question of controlling atomic energy. He was an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and he could scarcely be characterized as a frivolous man. Yet here he was publicly discussing how to solve the very differences at issue on the H-bomb and asserting: “The simple fact is that many important decisions are being made in Washington today without adequate evaluation. . . . To my mind we have not yet evolved a satisfactory procedure for evaluating differences of opinion among technical experts.”

This was in some ways the most disturbing statement made during the entire debate, for while the President was crying for more secrecy, some of his most illustrious and best-informed associates were pointing out the Conant speech to reporters as the real truth of the situation within the government. In these circumstances, was there an obligation to publish, or was this to be kept out of the papers too? And if so, what is the end of such a process in a democracy?

What is particularly disturbing about this problem is that the same demands for secrecy are made on less important issues as well, so that when a really big issue comes up, it is difficult for the government to make a serious new argument.

There should, of course, be some means by which the responsible reporter and the responsible official could discuss, in private and with mutual confidence, the implications of the President’s dilemma over the H-bomb. But it is precisely this lack of mutual confidence which is the problem.

In these circumstances the least we in the newspaper business can do is to try to analyze our own faults and try to correct them, but this will not be done, I suggest, by adopting softer standards of reporting. The power of the government is growing all the time and our skepticism will have to grow with it. The power of the executive to decide issues in the secret stage of negotiations with other nations is growing all the time and this, I fear, is going to impose new obligations on reporters and probably bring them even more info conflict with officials than in the past.

What the United States does now in the realm of foreign affairs is almost always done as part of a coalition. When it negotiates agreements in secret, the theory is that 1 he agreement will always be subject to review by Congress, but the power of review isn’l what it used to be.

We no longer have a government of “equal powers” in the field of foreign affairs, if we ever did have. The Congress retains all its powers over the purse and it still has the right of review, but the President and the Secretary of State in the executive branch are now more than ever before in a position to call the turn. When the President announces to the world that he wants aid for Greece, the Congress does not really have complete freedom of action; it can only go along with him or repudiate and humiliate him — and it will always hesitate to do the latter. The Congress theoretically could refuse to vote the funds to build the hydrogen bomb, but once the executive branch of the government announced that the bomb effort was going to be made, the Congress had very little practical choice but to go along.

This is an increasing and an important trend, for almost everything the United States does in the field of foreign affairs is now done in collaboration with other nations. Thus the executive is always coming to the Congress with a policy in one hand and a reminder in the other that any major change by Congress would embarrass the United States in its relations with other countries.

It seems to me, if public opinion is to retain anything but the power of protest after the event, the reporter has to move into action much earlier in the development of policy than formerly. The State Department would like to keep him out of the picture until the basis of an agreement is reached with other countries and the tentative agreement is sent to Capitol Hill; but by then policy has crystallized so much that aggressive reporting of the facts could in some instances upset a whole series of applecarts.

It should not be impossible, at some point in most of our negotiations before informal commitments are taken, for our government to indicate the broad lines of the policy it favors, so that there can be some objective discussion of the facts in public. But if the government will not make an effort to try to inform the people, then I think it is the reporter’s duty to do the best he can to inform them, and the newspaper’s duty to see that the reporter is given time out from routine coverage of the news to do so.

I have wondered what a good reporter and philosopher like William Allen White would say about this problem if he came to Washington once more. He was a courteous man, but I think if he sat in on our State Department press conferences today he would feel, not that the reporters were pressing too hard, but that they had become a little too courteous, that there were not enough chips on enough shoulders. I think he would want to know why the papers had assigned just a handful of their large corps of Washington reporters to probe into these life-and-death questions of atomic energy, the organization of the armed services, the conduct of our foreign policy, and the personalities and characters of the men involved.

As a matter of fact I think he would rather enjoy the game of cops and robbers in Washington and think it was inevitable and healthy. I imagine he would tell us that officials in Washington or Emporia, Kansas, had always sought to hide as much information as possible, especially when they did not quite know where they were going, and that one of the necessary antidotes to this very human procedure was for brash young men to ask sticky questions and keep using their legs.